News

Jun Murai enters the French National Order of the Legion of Honour

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Jun Murai, W3C Steering Committee Member and Professor of Keio University has accepted the Knight of the Legion of Honour Medal from the French government. The decoration ceremony took place on 13 February at the French Ambassador’s residence. The Legion of Honour is the highest French order of merit for military and civil merits created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802.

French Ambassador to Japan Laurent Pic, who decorated Murai-sensei, introduced Jun Murai as an “Internet Samurai” in the world. Thanks to Jun’s Internet research activities, his accomplishments contributed greatly to the advancement of society as well as technical progress. In addition, France also showed that he has continued to collaborate with Japan and research exchanges with Japan in the Internet field for many years through him.

Following words of thanks, Jun explained in detail the relationship with France in Internet research. “There are a lot of network researchers in the United States but in the part related to standardization, France and Japan combined in many cases, such as the World Wide Web and satellite Internet,” said Jun Murai, before concluding. “I wish this will lead to further development in the digital technology field, including the power of the young people of both countries in the future.”

Photos by Susumu ISHITO. Read the article on the website of the French Embassy in Japan (Japanese, French).

The Pointer Events Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Pointer Events Level 2. The features in this specification extend or modify those found in Pointer Events, a W3C Recommendation that describes events and related interfaces for handling hardware agnostic pointer input from devices including a mouse, pen, touchscreen, etc. For compatibility with existing mouse based content, this specification also describes a mapping to fire Mouse Events for other pointer device types.

Over the past several years the W3C Business Development team has heard from a number of mid-sized companies that while they are very interested in participating in W3C the Membership Fees were too high for them to justify. That was compounded by several conversations members of the W3C Team had with organizations in our newest vertical – Publishing. Many of the drivers in that vertical are in this category and had said a new level would be attractive for them. Based on this, we ran between Feb 2018 and Feb 2019 an experimental Membership level aimed at public organizations that have revenues in the medium range to see if the new level would, in fact, attract Members.

Our goal was to get eight new Members in that time and we’ve reached that goal! The organizations that have joined are Geotab (Automotive), Macmillan Learning (Publishing), Media Do Holdings (Publishing), New Relic, Inc. (Security), The Paciello Group (upgraded!), Ping Identity (Identity), SportTotal (Media) and W. W. Norton (Publishing). As you can see we have a diverse set of industries represented by these organizations and you’ll see them in various groups around W3C. Based on this success we have made this a permanent level and as organizations apply for Membership they will see this option.

This Membership Fee is available for existing Members as well if they qualify (it is designed for public organizations that have revenues between $50M and $500M USD, or equivalent in the other currencies of W3C Hosts). If you are interested in this, or have any questions or comments please contact J. Alan Bird, W3C Global Business Development Leader.

Solidarity of the W3C to the family of Vagner Diniz

The W3C Team and Offices offer their sincerest condolences to our W3C Brazil Office Manager Vagner Diniz, his wife and family, for the tragedy that befell them when the Brumadinho dam collapsed late January, claiming the lives of their daughter Camila, their son Luiz, their pregnant daughter-in-law Fernanda and other family members whose bodies we keep hoping they find. We have no words in the face of such a dramatic and horrifying event and our hearts go to them as well as the many people who, directly and indirectly, have been hit.

Since 2001, years before the 2007 launch of the W3C Brazil Office, hosted by the NIC.br (Brazilian Network Information Center) institute, in São Paulo, many in the W3C Team and global W3C Community have known and have met Vagner at different occasions. Our heartfelt condolences to Vagner Diniz, his wife Helena Taliberti, and his entire family.

First Public Working Draft: WebXR Device API

The Immersive Web Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of the WebXR Device API. This specification describes support for accessing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices, including sensors and head-mounted displays, on the Web.

Hardware that enables Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications are now broadly available to consumers, offering an immersive computing platform with both new opportunities and challenges. The ability to interact directly with immersive hardware is critical to ensuring that the web is well equipped to operate as a first-class citizen in this environment.

Immersive computing introduces strict requirements for high-precision, low-latency communication in order to deliver an acceptable experience. It also brings unique security concerns for a platform like the web. The WebXR Device API provides the interfaces necessary to enable developers to build compelling, comfortable, and safe immersive applications on the web across a wide variety of hardware formfactors.

Working Group Note: Character Model for the World Wide Web: String Matching

String identity matching is the process by which a specification or implementation defines whether two string values are the same or different from one another. It describes the ways in which texts that are semantically equivalent can be encoded differently and the impact this has on matching operations important to formal languages. Topics include normalization and case folding.

The Accessibility Foundation is an expertise center providing information, research, Web evaluation and training in the field of accessibility of Web sites and Web applications to companies and governments. We are committed to the development of Web accessibility standards at W3C.